James Taylor's Decision Management

Dan Tortorici of Oracle had a nice article about the combination of business process management (BPM) and complex event processing (CEP) called Building The Instantly Responsive Enterprise. Like Dan I think that BPM and CEP both have a role to play in building an "instantly responsive" enterprise and I believe that this mindset - instant, 24/7, responsiveness - is one that most if not all enterprise will need to survive and thrive.
Where I differ from Dan is that I see decision making - and the automation of decisions specifically - as critical. A process defines how to do what needs doing but to execute "hands-free" it needs to know what needs doing - it needs a decision made. CEP, Dan's solution to this, is a term that includes correlating events (to form more complex ones) and then acting on those events. Correlating events helps me know that a decision is required but may not be enough to help me decide what to do (as I discussed in this blog post on decisions and event processing). For BPM and CEP to deliver on this promise of instant responsiveness I believe they both need access to a set of decision services that embody how the enterprise makes decisions and I have blogged about the role of decisioning in SOA/EDA/BPM/CEP before